Would the expertise of a cultural consultant be such a solution to this flawed epistemological process?
Perhaps. I don't know very much (if anything) about cultural consultancy, so I cannot say one way or the other.
Here is an example my own experience. I think I did a good job handling this situation.
I am an emigrant from the US. I left the US because I found more meaning abroad. I experience a fair share of ethnocentric comments, but am able to easily brush them off as unjustified. They simply display the ignorance of the speaker.
Recently, however, I saw several news stories related to a number travesties occurring in the US (I'm sure everyone knows the details, so I won't go into them). My reaction was
my home-country is going bonkers. I was outraged.
Then I realized that the statement
my country may have been unjustified. Do I own my country? Does my country own me? Does of being born within the same set of borders give me any greater connection the people committing and the victims of those acts than anyone else in the world? After deciding that those claim were unjustified, my outrage faded. Horrible things happen in the world every day. They are all tragedies, but those things happening in the US were not directed at me, specifically.
Since then, I've been thinking a lot about the pandemic, racism, and activism.
I saw how the pandemic was easily solved in some countries, but not others. Did that mean there was something inherently superior about those countries, or did its officials and individual citizens simply make different choices? If better choices, grounded in firmer evidence, had been made in some countries, fewer humans would have lost their lives.
Then I looked at racism, and discovered that no racist belief can be properly justified: despite differences in racial outcomes (which may be the result of numerous facts), there are greater differences in success inside race categories than between them. Once again, the problem was one of epistemology.
Still, I looked deeper into the problems I saw occurring in the US. I have a neighbor who can't say two good words about the Turks, yet she has never (intentionally) harmed someone of Turkish origin. Thus racism can be either violent or non-violent (but still incredible problematic. Regardless, belief is racial superiority is not enough to cause physical harm. I Malice, wrath, or simple indifference is also necessary.
Then I looked at activism, and saw that very few people were trying to solve the problem of correct epistemological reasoning. I see individuals telling whites to examine their whiteness, etc. But whiteness is not itself a problem. White is a color, not a belief system. The problem, I see, is that we (me included) believe things that are not true, but lack the humility to admit our beliefs about the world are not justified.
